How much money can you afford to waste?
“How much money can you afford to waste?”
When I’m facilitating a workshop or brainstorming session with a large organization or a government agency, that’s a question I often ask, usually fairly early in the session.
We’re calculating how much we can afford to waste right now
I’m usually met with hesitant glances. Waste? I can hear them thinking. We can’t afford to waste anything. But he wouldn’t be asking the question if the answer were that obvious …
I’ll persist into the silence. “How much money can you lose?” More bafflement.
I had the money right here, Captain.
“Gone. Poof!” You can imagine me being provocative.
Well, maybe not like that …
By now the participants are uncomfortable. What, they are thinking, is the point of this little exercise in pressure? And I tell them.
People come to brainstorming or program design workshops to develop new proposals. That means thinking differently.
Everything we adopt as a habit — and procedures are merely an organization’s habits, codified — seemed like a good idea at the time. (The complacency of habit is the emotional reason for Not Invented Here syndrome — ‘why, we have thought deeply about the problem, and if we did not think of it, then it could not have been very good.)
Do I have to push out a new idea?
To change what we are doing moves us out of our comfort zone. Every time I’ve tried something new, initially I’ve done it clumsily, self-consciously, not terribly well. Skill comes with study, practice, repetition, and live encounters.
The same is true for public policy. Problems are complex; new approaches always involve doing things without knowing how they’ll work. Some things inevitably go wrong — and afterwards, we can see why they went wrong.
The insight of hindsight — my goodness, in retrospect, it’s so obvious! — can be viewed in one of two ways:
· Critical. “You should have figured that out beforehand.”
· Experimental. “Hey, we discovered something.”
Both views are valid — most things are inferable beforehand — but there’s a vast difference between deducing something works and demonstrating it works.
In other words, “how much can you afford to waste?” is another way of asking, “what is the price of knowledge?“
How much money can we afford to waste? An answer might be any of the following:
Just pick one
· Anything that doesn’t ‘bet the farm’. Very occasionally, one must bet the farm because the farm is about to be lost; in all other circumstances, the organization needs to protect itself, so the amount of capital we can waste must be rationed.
· Whatever I can make a business case for. At my for-profit company Recap, we are constantly innovating and experimenting, taking on hopeless causes (and sometimes rescuing them!), trying to solve intractable problems, advocating for necessary change, or simply pointing out critical problems. We can use such a flexible and unstructured approach to experimentation because we’re small and we’re self-motivated, and those doing the innovation at least have practice doing it!
· My entire R&D budget. Many organizations create a separate R&D department, with its own budget, as a means of centralizing and prioritizing their innovation. That’s good for larger entities, where it doesn’t do to have the entire work force rushing out pursuing wills-o-the-wisp.
· A stipulated capital pilot program. For governments, who have no formal R&D function, pilot programs are one means of giving themselves permission to experiment. (Congressional earmarks are another; they can be used for direct pilots that bypass hidebound bureaucracies.) As I said at Downing Street:
That’s part of why I like pilots — they are licenses to fail, and that license is essential.
If you cannot fail, you never risk.
If you cannot risk, you never experiment.
If you cannot experiment, you never innovate.
License to fail, license to risk, license to innovate
So the next time someone asks you, “How much money can you afford to waste?” you’ll have many ways to reply.
Weird Al had it right
